Post Script to Lewin on Babbitt on Schoenberg

I confess that I ignored David's suggestion to add this manuscript to the Milton Babbitt Collection, and it now resides where it belongs, in the Library of Congress' David Lewin Collection.

To my knowledge this lecture has never been published. And it's quite possible that it won't be published in its entirety any time in the foreseeable future. I say this for two reasons.

First, at a superficial glance, everything here is covered in various other sources in the relevant literature.  While the lecture is a brilliant condensed description of the dodecaphonic big bang creating a universe-within-a-universe that still awaits further exploration and colonization, there is nothing really "new" here to the cognoscenti.

Second, the current comfort zone for music analytic studies, at least in the U.S., is Schubert, not Schoenberg. Today, while atonal and "post-tonal" theory may harbor areas that hold some interest, serial theory per se is somewhat démodé in academia. At least this is what that environment feels like to me, a few possible exceptions notwithstanding. But I must admit that I am speaking here as a total outsider.

So why bother with this little lecture in honor of Milton Babbitt's contributions to serial music theory? Well, in one sense it's a gentle reminder that David Lewin's musical soul – the composer inside – is fundamentally Schoenbergian.  Some sense of this can be gained by reading a tribute by his former friends and colleagues. 

Those familiar with Lewin's Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations will easily recognize this lecture as an earlier, condensed version of a large chunk of that book's Chapter 6, so much so that it's tempting to go back and read GMIT from the middle out rather than from beginning to end.  In fact, over the past decade, this is exactly how I have come to read GMIT, probably the primary cause of my intensely personal, heterodox (and certainly wrong-headed) approach to contemporary music theory/theories.  Things may possibly have changed for the better lately, since I have not been in touch with the post-Lewin/Clough generation.  But last time I looked, the music academy was trapped within a tonal comfort zone where the game is to over-justify the already over-determined triad.

Rameau is dead.  Long live Rameau!

Basta!